Solace and saudade

Fernando Kaskais

Jul 25

Cape St Vincent, Portugal, 2012. Photo by Alfredo D'Amato/Panos

In the face of an inscrutable, indifferent universe, Pessoa suggests we cultivate a certain longing for the elusive horizon

Jonardon Ganeri is Bimal K Matilal Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto in Canada. His books include Inwardness: An Outsiders' Guide (2021) and Virtual Subjects, Fugitive Selves: Fernando Pessoa and his Philosophy (2020).

Sarah Seymour is a fiction writer and essayist. She teaches at Chiang Mai University, and is currently working on her second novel. Her first novel, 'Sun Over Konocti', is a speculative story that explores the idea of simultaneous realities.

An elusive point sits on the horizon. A deep yearning stirs within to move closer to this point, perhaps in search of the unknown, perhaps in search of questions without answers. It is a yearning that will never be fulfilled. It is a point never reached. This yearning is the all-too-human inclination for our lives to somehow be different than they are, and for the universe not to be indifferent to our cares and concerns.

In her essay 'The Blue of Distance' (2005), the US author Rebecca Solnit associates this point never-reached with the colour blue. She writes:

For many years, I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go.

When combined with the longing for something absent, for something that simply can't be, this is saudade, a Portuguese expression for a state akin to melancholic longing. A complex emotion where a melancholic grey seeps into the distant blue.

Lacking any easy English translation, saudade seems to be an emotion that can be expressed only through poetry or other evocations of its melancholic longing. Whereas nostalgia is a longing for something that once existed, a person or place or experience that lives in our memory, saudade encompasses a longing for something that never was, something not attainable.

Within the yearning, a sense of incompleteness exists, a feeling of loss for something we never actually had. We want, for example, to connect to the divine, to the universe, in a personal and meaningful way. We long to find meaning in our existence and our experiences – and the meaning we tend to attach to the confusion and loss we feel when this fails to happen is of some sort of providential punishment or karmic backlash. No matter how we attempt to make sense of what we experience, the indifference lingers, an unsettling realisation that nothing, ultimately, matters. We long for the things we do and say to make a difference, for the universe to respond to our call in a way that is just and kind. But it simply can't.

How can we still find solace living in such a world, where indifference is all there is, to reach a place where our yearning has not disappeared but yet has, in some way, been transformed?

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In her essay '"Saudade" and "Soledad": Fernando Pessoa and Antonio Machado on Nostalgia and Loneliness' (2007), the Lusophone scholar Estela Vieira provides a possible solution. She writes:

'Saudade' in Pessoa is a lot more related to loneliness since the absence of others is what causes the painful feelings regularly associated with nostalgia. Yet the absence is itself a creative presence populated with imagined others a lot more real than the emptiness of reality. Like all feelings, loneliness for him is nothing more than one of the sources of creation.

Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) lived what was in many ways an astonishingly modern, transcultural and translingual life. He was born in Lisbon, the point of departure for Vasco da Gama's voyage to India as commemorated by Pessoa's forebear, the poet Luís de Camões. Pessoa grew up in Anglophone Durban in South Africa, acquiring a life-long love for English poetry and language. Returning to Lisbon in 1905, which he would never again leave, Pessoa set himself the goal to travel throughout an infinitude of inner landscapes, to be an explorer of inner worlds.

He published very little during his lifetime but left behind a renowned trunk containing a treasure trove of scraps, on which were written some of the greatest literary works of the 20th century, mainly in Portuguese but also substantially in English and French. Pessoa wrote poems under a variety of heteronyms, the 'virtual subjects' of his imagination; and also, importantly, a novel, or rather the anti-novel, The Book of Disquiet (1982), whose protagonist, Bernardo Soares, ruminates in detail on the meaning of being...

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